What is a timesheet and how do you prepare one? Sample codes and month-end close

You are the HR officer of a 30-person company. On the 25th of the month a message arrives from accounting: “When will the timesheets be ready?” The shift rota for the twenty-two people in production is on the wall, the sign-in sheet for the eight office staff is in a drawer and the leave requests are in your inbox. Putting them all side by side and turning them into a single table will take you a day and a half, and in the end one or two people’s days still won’t add up. This article explains step by step what a timesheet is, which data it comes from and how an orderly month-end close works.

A timesheet is a record of working time, usually kept monthly, that shows on which days employees worked in a period, on which days they were on leave, on sick leave or absent, and how much overtime they did.

What is a timesheet for, and why does it matter?

The timesheet is the company’s single, approved answer to the question “who worked when?” Payroll preparation relies on this answer; managers read absence trends from this table, HR reads leave usage and operations reads the overtime load. When the timesheet is wrong, the correction usually surfaces at the payroll stage or through an employee’s complaint, which costs both time and trust. A correct, approved timesheet settles most of these complaints before they start.

What data makes up a timesheet?

A timesheet is not a data source in itself but a combination of several records. If one of these sources is missing or wrong, the table will be wrong too.

• Clock-in and clock-out events: on which day, and between which hours, the person was at the workplace.
• Leave records: approved annual leave, personal leave and other leave days.
• Shift plan: which shift, and which hours, the person was scheduled for that day.
• Overtime records: additional working time that was requested and approved.
• Sick notes and other documented absences: days outside leave for which the reason is documented.

How do you prepare a timesheet? Closing steps for the monthly timesheet

1. Fix the period and the calendar. At the start, make clear which dates the timesheet covers, the public holidays and the shift plan.
2. Collect the raw clock-in and clock-out data. Card reader, terminal or sign-in sheet: whatever the source, bring it together in one place.
3. Match events to employees. Make sure each row belongs to the right person; duplicate records for the same person or rows without a person are caught at this stage.
4. Process leave. Days with approved leave are separated from absence; do not mark a day as “leave” before the leave request is approved.
5. Sort out exceptions. Late arrivals, early departures, days without a recorded exit and unexplained absences go onto a separate list.
6. Check overtime against the approved request. Who worked extra, on which day and for how many hours must match the approval record.
7. Get the manager’s approval and lock the period. Every change to a locked timesheet must be recorded together with its reason.
8. Report it and send it to accounting. The approved summary becomes the input for payroll preparation.

How do you keep a timesheet? Sample codes for the timesheet table

Using a single code for each day in the timesheet makes it easier to read. The codes below are only examples; you can change them for your own company. What matters is that you define the codes once and that everyone uses them with the same meaning.

A fictitious example: here is how one week of Employee A’s records turns into the timesheet. Notice why the event record and the timesheet code are not the same.

The most common timesheet mistakes

• Marking a leave day as absent. When the leave record stays in a file separate from the timesheet, the table shows an absence because there were no events that day.
• Entering overtime without approval. Overtime with no clear record of who requested it and who approved it causes disputes at month end.
• Leaving lateness unexplained. Someone who was late because of a manager-approved meeting appears on the same list as someone who was late for no reason.
• Not locking the period. Silent corrections made after the month closes create differences between payroll and the timesheet.
• Not reflecting shift changes in the plan. The employee swapped shifts but the plan was not updated, so the actual record is counted as an error.

How should I keep timesheets in a 30-person company?

A 30-person company usually has two working patterns side by side: an office team on fixed hours and a production or field team on shifts. Rather than tying both to the same rule, simple clock-in and clock-out control for the office and a comparison of planned versus actual for the shift team are enough. In a company of thirty, the biggest risk is that the timesheet depends on one person’s efforts at month end. Three simple rules reduce this risk:

• One source: keep clock-in and clock-out, leave and overtime records under the same employee ID; don’t merge three files at month end.
• Weekly close: close that week’s exceptions every Friday, so only the last week’s work is left at month end.
• Clear responsibility: department managers approve their own team’s exceptions, and HR combines the approved records and locks the period.

Think of the timesheet not as a report produced at month end, but as a record that is cleaned up throughout the month.

A realistic plan for the first month could look like this: in week one, set the codes and the people responsible; in week two, match the existing leave and overtime records with the employee list; from week three, start the Friday close. At month end, comparing the first full timesheet produced with your old method and with the new set-up shows clearly which record breaks down where.

Can you keep timesheets in Excel? Where paper, Excel and WhatsApp break down

In a team of fifteen to twenty people at one location without shifts, Excel is usually enough: one row per person, one column per day, totals at the bottom. In the following situations, however, the table starts to lose its reliability:

• When shifts and overtime are added, the number of cells grows, formulas break and errors become hard to find.
• Because leave is kept in a separate file, a leave day looks like an absence in the timesheet.
• Managers send the sheet as a photo over WhatsApp, and it is unclear which version is the latest.
• You cannot see who made a correction after the period closed, or why.

How is a timesheet report prepared in YazSis KurumsalPortal?

The Time & Attendance Control module brings the first four steps of the month-end close together on a single screen. It matches attendance events to employees, separates late arrivals, early departures and absences as exceptions, and manages the checking and approval of exceptions. Because attendance records are matched with leave records, leave days are separated from absences. The timesheet is produced from approved records, giving you clean attendance data for payroll preparation.

If you have a team working shifts, the Shift & Overtime Planning module completes the planning side: it creates daily, weekly and monthly shifts and keeps staff assignment and the approval of overtime requests in the same flow. This way “planned” and “actual” can be read side by side in the timesheet.

If you want to move the month-end close from manual merging into a single flow, you can see the module structure on the KurumsalPortal page and the details on the relevant module pages.